Belle Prater's Boy, by Ruth White

The heroine of this children's book, who I regret to say is named Gypsy, acquires a new live-in family member when her cousin Woodrow moves in after his mother, Belle Prater, vanishes without a trace or explanation. It's 1953 Virginia and they're both twelve.

Most of this book is a gentle, well-written story about their relationship. It's a good book, objectively speaking, and I generally enjoyed reading it, but it's a 1996 Newbery Honor book and it is SO Newbery Honor.

There are two central mysteries in this book. One is why Gypsy's father committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. He was a firefighter who was burned on the job, but had recovered before inexplicably killing himself.

Belle Prater's disappearance is set up as this big mystery. She vanished without a trace, no one saw her go, none of her possessions were missing, there was no sign of violence, and her husband wasn't abusive. Woodrow says there was a magical place in their backyard and he thinks she stepped into it. But this is a Newbery book so...

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That aside, it's quite well-written and atmospheric. I can see why it was a Newbery book. In more ways than one.

When did we stop caring that elves aren't real?

Starting around the 1950s, a number of books in English for children had the message that magic isn't real. Helpfully for the historical cause, many of them won Newbery Medals or Honor, so they are very easy to come across.

The basic plot is that Protagonist Kid meets a kid (Tragic Kid) who claims that magic (elves, etc) is real. The kids do magic spells, make elf homes, etc. Protagonist Kid usually isn't sure that the magic is real, but wants to believe that it is. At the end it is revealed that magic is definitely not real, there are no elves, and Tragic Kid was making it all up to cover up for the fact that their father is abusive/their mother is an addict/they have no parents and are living alone/etc. Protagonist Kid is sadder but wiser.

There are variants on this, such as Bridge to Terabithia, in which no one ever believes that the magic is real - it's explicitly a game - but it ends in tragedy anyway.

I recently came across an example of this, published in 1996, and realized that it is the most recent example I can recall of the genre. Am I missing examples of it, or did they stop getting written or published?

The thing that has always struck me most about this genre is that it's a solution in search of a problem. Kids believing in magic and elves and so forth is not actually a big social problem, but the books treat it as if is. They are written as if the belief must be broken with a devastating shock, when in reality, most kids gradually learn that their parents are Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, without the need for a dramatic revelation.

Those are also beliefs which are over way before kids are old enough to read the "there's no such thing as magic" books. The books aren't teaching kids there's no such thing as magic, because by the time they're old enough to read them they already know that. They're actually teaching them that if they read a book hoping that it's fantasy, it may in fact be a book about how fantasy isn't real.

Anyway, the genre thankfully seems to have died the death. But that made me wonder about some things. Why was this ever considered worthwhile to begin with? Why is it always fantasy book-style magic that needs to be dispelled, rather than the sort of supernatural things that people really do believe in as adults, like crystal healing and possession by demons and magical-type conspiracy theories?